"a fish, a barrel, and a smoking gun"for 7 December 2000. Updated every WEEKDAY.

Hit & Run 12.7.00

Like smalltown wags sitting around the general store and watching the
once-a-week Greyhound bus roll through, journalists in the Big Apple
like to imagine what the world
outside sleepy old Manhattan must be like. Considering their limited experience
imagining the lives of the assorted flatlanders, rev'nooers, carpetbaggers and
interlopers who inhabit the world outside their particular corner of Walton's
Mountain, it's probably not surprising that New York reporters always seem
to reach the same general conclusion. Apparently, Hollywood, the
dotcom world, politics, and moguls of any sort are all guilty of
exactly the same crimes: self-absorption, amusing dimwittedness in the face of
a reporter's common sense (which New York's hard-hittingest have as a
given), and enormous wealth and power that are sadly squandered. To
wit, The New Yorker's recent "My Fake Job" piece (published
in the
now-infamous "Digital Age"
issue). The article relates the general confusion that must exist in the
dotcom world, as young writer Rodney Rothman plays a slacking feuilletonist
(Rothman's preparation for the part included an
overachieving college career and a fresh-out-of-school stint as head writer for David Letterman), who fakes his way into a Silicon Alley business by simply sitting down at a desk and pretending to work, announcing that he is "from the Chicago satellite
office." In The New Yorker's rush to smirk, or sigh, at those dotcom
thingies that have become such a blight on fair Gotham, the magazine seems to
have overlooked the possibility that the writer could
play a trick on The New Yorker
as easily as he could hoodwink his fake employer. Specifically, Rothman didn't
fake his way into the job at all; he set himself up
through a contact at the company who happened to be his own mother
(a suitably creepy angle, and one that, if followed up, might have made for a more
interesting article). Various other details proved fishy, and the magazine finally
knuckled under and
apologized. Characteristically,
editor David Remnick managed to turn his confession into another opportunity
to kiss his own ass, downplaying the screwups and highlighting the
magazine's superhuman scrupulousness. The worst of the problems,
Remnick averred, "could easily have been fixed in the editing,"
which is about as specific as saying it could have
been fixed in the writing. But given how many times we've seen
these easy-sell, rote stories about the frivolous ways of LA,
Washington, Silicon Valley, and any place where power and money and
people not from New York gather, it may come as a surprise to the
average New York journalist that it's not the rest of the world that
needs to be fixed.

At last, a government official we can respect  the State Department's J. Stapleton Roy, who this week resigned his post under protest. That's right, protest. An assistant Secretary of State and three-time ambassador, Roy did what so few Clinton administration officials have been willing to do 
quit on ethical principle (rather than merely writing a book). What set J. Stapleton Roy off wasn't any particular bombing campaign, crippling
economic sanctions, laughable peace initiative, or (of particular interest to former Ambassador to Singapore Roy) squandering of US credibility in a failed campaign to
save a
moronic juvenile delinquent from being caned. No, J. Stapleton Roy had his fill this week when Secretary of State Madeleine Albright actually held someone responsible for the loss of a State Department laptop computer containing vital national security information. Since one of the men removed from his post was Stape Roy's own underling, this made
Stape Roy look bad, and our boy walked. Not wanting to look bad at work no matter what the hell happens is a principle Suck respects above all others, but in this case we're most impressed
with the way J. Stapleton Roy  who had a mere four vacation-depleted weeks
to go in his term anyway  managed to sacrifice for his principles without
actually sacrificing anything. All the glory of that last month at Foggy Bottom  the pats on the back, the invitation to visit again soon, the "World's Greatest Fisherman" coffee mug, the "surprise" going away party where you get to eat cake at your own desk  Roy threw it all away because it was the right thing to do. Four weeks of Clinton agenda be damned, you can only push a man in public service a few decades before he pushes back. We only hope that, with our pensions secured, our careers behind us, and with no further need for any damn laptops, we'll have what it takes to do the same.

America's greatest crises have always produced episodes in which the
nation's dazzling and seemingly inexhaustible bounty is vividly demonstrated:
millions of cornfed doughboys disembarking in France, the mighty
Tennessee Valley Authority bringing power and light to the South,
German pilots overwhelmed by skies filled with American planes, Japanese
prisoners swooning as their trains rolled through the industrial vastness of the
Rust Belt. At last, the Gore-Bush legal tangle has shown another American
glory  the sheer, breathtaking depth of our national pundit reserves.
Forget all that praise for a system that will eventually work. More than
four weeks into post-election extra innings, we've barely had to go to the
relief commentators. Sure, it's nice to have Roger Clemens ready to start game one of the World Series  but it's here, in inning twelve of game seven, that
we begin to see just how deep the bench is. Across the expanses of
MSNBCNNFOX, retired Senators, second-string cabinet officials, under-secretaries, talk
radio hosts, Watergate lawyers, ghosts of politics past, and even dotcom journos work utility while the go-to Gergens, Wills, Finemans, and Russerts catch their breath.
And there's a
murderer's row of rookies just warming up, freshly brought up
from the minors. Or
maybe the proper analogy isn't baseball, but tag-team wrestling.
Fresh pundits leap into
the ring like wrestlers pouncing on the heel who took the belt away from them ten years ago. "Wait a minute!" Chris Matthews shouts over a Michael Dukakis rant, "That's Dick
Thornburg's music!" And indeed, the former Bush Attorney General tosses Dukakis to
the mat, only to find himself head slammed by a chair wielding retired Illinois Senator
Paul Simon, with follow-up from Steve Forbes, leftist 'zine editrix
Katrina vanden Heuvel, and countless
heroes and villains still waiting to jump into the ring.
The world may snicker at the
18th century electoral college and 16th century voting machines that got us into this
mess. But the world also knows that even when talk is this cheap, we're still the richest
nation on earth.